Playwright William Gibson, whose award winning script ‘The Miracle Worker’ told the hopeful tale of deaf and blind Helen Keller, died of unknown causes reaching the ripe old age of ninety-four.
 
Appearing first on television, Gibson later adapted ‘The Miracle Worker’ for a Broadway debut, featuring Patsy Duke as Keller and Anne Bancroft, who played the role of Anne Sullivan, responsible for teaching Keller how to communicate, and who with Sullivan by her side went on to become a well-known author and humanitarian.
 
The play bagged three Tony awards, Broadway’s highest honour, for best play, best actress (Bancroft) and best director (Arthur Penn).  Its 1962 film adaptation, won Oscars for Bancroft (Best Actress) and Duke (Supporting Actress), with nominations for both Penn and Gibson.
 
Gibson’s ‘Two for the Seesaw, a play about a straight-laced lawyer and a dancer, was nominated for a Best Play Tony and later it was also made into a movie starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.  His musical ‘Golden Boy’, starring Sammy Davis, Jr. won a Tony nomination, while ‘Golda’, a play about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, was panned by critics, though a revised version ‘Golda’s Balcony’, went on to become popular in 2003.
 
Amongst his works are included short stories, poems, a novel - ‘The Cobweb’, a memoir - ‘A Mass for the Dead’.
 
Gibson whose wife Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a noted psychologist, teacher, writer and social activist, died in 2004, in a 2003 interview said: ‘The act of writing makes everything possible to me.  ‘I’ve always found the business of writing has helped me to live.’